This 19-Year-Old Genius MIT Dropout And Thiel Fellow Just Launched A Health Startup

Delian Asparouhov, a 19-year-old Thiel Fellow and recent dropout
from MIT, just launched a new health startup called Nightingale.

Driven by his grandmother's battle with breast cancer and feeling
frustrated by her quality of care, Asparouhov set out to improve
the quality of patient care through technology.

Today, Asparouhov and his co-founder Eric Bakan are
launching Nightingale for iOS and Android.

Nightingale wants to help ensure patients never forget their
medication again. The mobile app learns your lifestyle so that it
can provide each patient with accurate, custom medication
reminders.

If a daughter is taking care of her father, she could also
benefit from Nightingale to track her dad's compliance and get
alerts if he's taking less than 10% of his medications.

Nightingale also wants to help improve the communication
between patients and their doctors. Down the road, it will
provide on-demand data and a suite of analytics so that
caregivers and health care providers can gain better insight into
a patient's health.

A service
provider with only one or two patients likely won't have to pay,
but someone with multiple patients may have to pay yearly fee on
a per-patient basis.

Following
the
sentimentsof Square founder and
college dropout Jack Dorsey and high school dropout David Karp of
Tumblr, Asparouhov says that dropping out isn't for
everyone.

"I think my philosophy on this and what frustrates me with people
trying go to deal with this issue is, they try to give really
general, overarching advice," Asparouhov says.
"They'll say, 'Oh everyone should drop out of school' or
'Oh, no one should drop out of school. It's one of those
individual decisions that just needs to be made on a case-by-case
experience."

In Asparouhov's case, he had overloaded himself
with classes and finished up a lot of his computer science degree
requirements pretty quickly. He was only in his second year at
MIT., but was technically considered to be a junior.

The only classes left were introductory courses to computer
science — classes that he had previously skipped. But Asparouhov
says MIT would not allow him to graduate without taking
them.

Asparouhov ultimately decided to just drop out
and use his time more productively, especially given his
experience interning at Square the summer before.